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In the life of Sir Bernard Gilpin, relative to customs of the Scottish-English borders it is recorded, that in the year 1560, the reverend gentleman observed in one of the churches in which he was preaching, a glove, hung high against the raftered roof. On making inquiries he learned that it was placed there in consequence of a "deadly feud" prevailing in the district, and that the owner had suspended it in defiance, daring to mortal combat anyone who took it down.

The last instance of defiance by the glove occurred in 1818 in a wager of battle. The battle, however, never came off; and the instance was the occasion of the repeal of the law permitting the ancient trial by battle and ordeal which existed in England for more than eight centuries.

In Italy and Spain the glove was cherished with the most romantic feeling ever accorded it throughout all its long and impressive history. No king of olden days exercised more despotic rule over his feudal dependents than the Spanish and Italian ladies over their "cavaliers," to whom even to be allowed to touch the fair one's glove was a favor which sent the aspiring lover into ecstacies. Many a yearning Romeo of that chivalric age must have exclaimed:

"Would that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!"

But if the symbolism of gloves and their old, romantic usages largely have fallen away, leaving us an article of familiar, practical, everyday concern, the language of gloves for us is not dead. When we take pains to be fittingly costumed for an important occasion, there is no detail of our dress which we are more anxious should be in perfect keeping, than our gloves. To them still clings a halo of sentiment, part and parcel of our own dignity. In view of their history we are justified in our feeling. "Gloves," says Beck, "outweigh all other articles of apparel which have been the outward and visible signs of hidden things."

HOW GLOVES CAME TO GRENOBLE

Many centuries ago, certain chieftains of the Allobroges were inspired to plant their little village of Cularo at the supremely strategic point of all southern Gaul. They built it a trifle to the East of the meeting place of two rivers, the Is?re and the torrent of the Drac; north of them stretched the high, unbroken wall of the lower Alps. And there in the sheltered valley they lived and were protected against incursions of other more warlike tribes--until the great conqueror of the world poured its invincible legions over the mountain barriers, and Rome seized the little Allobrogian defence town to be a colonial outpost of considerable military importance. On the site of Cularo sprang up the strongly fortified Gratianopolis, thus called in honor of the Emperor Gratian who reinforced the walls begun by Diocletian and Maximian. Later, with the decline of the Roman power and the development of the Frankish nation, the Latin name was abbreviated to Grenoble--by which the modern city is known to-day as the chef-lieu of the department of the Is?re in France.

For the raw materials were everywhere at hand. On the slopes of the mountains, enclosing like the tiers of a vast amphitheatre the city seemingly chosen by Nature to become the mis-en-sc?ne of the glove drama, millions of wild goats fed. Already the tanners and tawers had tested the admirable quality of their skins, and those of the females in particular were found to be of the fine, soft variety, peculiarly free from flaws, so admirably adapted to the making of gloves. For the process of tawing the skins, moreover, the waters of the Is?re, because of their singular purity, were incomparable. And in the city itself--its population now greatly increased by prosperity and peace--lived scores of skilled artisans and their sons, well fitted for the careful cutting and shaping of gloves; while the women, equipped with three-cornered needles, quickly became adepts in sewing gloves by hand.

Other occupations, which now received special impetus in mediaeval Grenoble, were the weaving of hemp textiles--for hemp was the most prolific crop of the alluvial river valleys--paper-making, and the manufacture of playing-cards; about 1630, the fruit of the vineyards on the mountain slopes, was turned into wine for exportation, and beautiful pottery and tiles were made of the rich clay deposits of the Drac. But of all these crafts, the one taking first rank from the very start, and the one which quickly identified itself with the town, was gloves. In the municipal acts, glovers often appear after 1606. In 1619 Claude Honor?, a master glover, was elected consul. And in 1664 a certain skilled workman, Jean Charpel, an artist in his line, proclaims himself glover to the king.

Although most historians date the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of modern Europe from the era of the Protestant Reformation, spanning the period from 1517 to about 1560, Grenoble remained for a hundred years longer a mediaeval city in every sense of the word. France continued a Catholic country, and Grenoble, sequestered in a southern province, scarcely felt the disquieting breath of the great religious revolution which was sweeping mid-Europe. Its ideas and its civilization changed little, even while fresh consciousness of its natural powers and material resources was impregnating the city with new industries. The spirit of craftsmanship--that joyous love of perfection, not only in the fine but also in the useful arts, which characterized the Renaissance--was still the ruling temper of its citizens; and the guild of glovers, the most numerous and influential of all the artisans, particularly personified this civic character. If we would gain some notion of the part glove-making actually played in the lives of these people, and the status of the glove-craft as it first appeared in mediaeval Europe, we have only to journey in imagination to Grenoble in the middle of the seventeenth century, on the occasion of the great annual festival of the glovers.

It is a clear, tranquil morning in the latter part of July, 1650, and the sun, scarcely an hour's march above the mountains, is flooding with almost tropic brilliancy the matchless paradise of the Dauphin?. In its confluence of rivers and fair valleys, the ancient capital city, Grenoble, shines in the midst of the green plain of Gr?sivaudan. Impossible to describe the ever-changing charm of the horizons!--as, from the city itself, the eye sweeps eastward, northward, westward, over range upon range of snow-crowned mountains, under a sky so pure, so glowing, that distant peaks apparently loom near, and the cool breath of Alpine heights gently smites the cheek.

Eastward, the prongs, the pinnacles, the clear-cut outlines of a sierra; it is the chain of Belledonne. From the devastation of its summits and terraced slopes, one divines beneath its summer cloak of verdure concealing only its lower descent, the adamantine rock moulded for all time by the glaciers of the ice age. It is indeed the advance guard of those massive crystal formations, the veritable backbone of the Alps, which penetrate into France from Mont Blanc. On a morning like this, the Swiss peak itself can be seen, cleaving the far-away heavens which overhang Savoy.

In the west the spectacle changes. Beyond the vast plain of the Drac appears a long, white cliff, little carved out--a rigid line of limestone falling sheer to the valley where lies Grenoble. This is the compact mass of Vercors, almost impassable. Yet, suddenly, the cliff makes way; the vale of Furon leaps through the chasm in the mountain wall. An ancient road, winding ribbonwise to westward, puts into communication the valley of the Is?re with the wooded brows, the vast grassy hollows, of the Vercors countryside.

Northward, the limestone reappears in the Chartreuse. But these mountains, unlike Vercors, are twisted and broken, resembling a half demolished castle with great apertures and rents in its once impregnable sides. Their countless little vales and fertile levels glow with stream-fed pasturage and with billowy forests. And everywhere, among the foothills of the encircling ranges, roam herds of goats and cattle, without suspicion of the fate which awaits them with the coming of the great Fair of the autumn at Grenoble.

On this July morning the old town gleams like a strange jewel, set in the spacious, lush meadow lands, stretching league on league, to the mountains. Vast gardens of hemp wave to its very walls. Vineyards veil the nearer hills, and the mulberry dots the plains of the southeast. The Is?re, restless, ever seeking new outlet, interlaces with a network of sparkling tributaries the great expanse of Gr?sivaudan. All the richness of the region, all the amazing variety and beauty with which nature has surrounded this ancient city, seems concentrated, in the early hush and radiance, in an act of worship.

Now the sun has penetrated the shadows below the city walls, and is stealing through the sinuous, crowded streets, peculiar to towns which long have been cramped within the precincts of strong fortifications. The tiled eaves lean so close one upon another, as in some places actually to shut out the sky. If we might fly up like a bird and look down over the Grenoble of 1650, we would be gazing upon a confusion of multi-colored roofs, set at every conceivable angle of picturesqueness, and upon a bewildering congregation of chimneys and chimney-pots. Also, we would note that the town lay on both banks of the Is?re, connected by a tower bridge, and protected on the north by the fortress of the Bastille.

House after house they pass and shop after shop, each bearing above the portal a shield emblazened with the selfsame coat-of-arms--the heraldic device of the guild of the glovers. Their occupants, gayest of the gay, fast swell the throng, with masters and their families and apprentices--the young boys in the retinues stealing shy glances at the pretty daughters of their masters, the maidens covertly returning their admirers' bashful looks.

According to monkish legend, the good Saint Anne made a livelihood while on earth by knitting gloves. "The knitting saint," in homely terms of affection the people liked to call her. They were wont to regard her as one like themselves--only holier far, for the great honor God saw fit to confer upon her--fulfilling her simple task from day to day, the needles always busy in her fingers. Their love for her was so strong, indeed, and so enduring, that early in the nineteenth century the glovers ordered a statue of their saint set up in a public square of Grenoble, where it may be seen to-day. It represents the mother of Mary, knitting, with a half-finished glove in her hand and a basket of gloves at her feet.

Angelus finds the merry-makers still romping, singing, dancing; a little wearily the couples break apart, and the townsfolk once more flock through the streets, transformed in the afterglow to running rivers of gold, and are lost in the stilly dusk of the cathedral. And now the tapers gleam like stars upon the altar of Saint Anne, and the fading flowers send forth a sweet, benumbing perfume, as heads are bowed to receive the evening benediction. On the rough, uneven stones of the floor they kneel, imploring in their hearts the good saint who protects and prospers all devout glovers, that the craft may wax stronger with every year in the city of Grenoble.

So we see an entire community uniting in a great religious, civic, industrial and social festival to celebrate and re-consecrate the craft of glove-making. The place of honor this calling held in former times is unique and striking. In the chapters which follow we shall observe how gloves--and especially the gloves of Grenoble--have sustained their early tradition through three hundred years of political vicissitude and commercial struggle.

THE GLOVERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

"Lo, the old order changeth!"

How the glove craft of Grenoble spontaneously sprang up, took firm root and grew until it controlled, to a great degree, the fortunes of that city, has been shown in the foregoing brief summary of events. The many phases of life with which glove-making was bound up in mediaeval days, its social and economic importance to the community and its pre-eminence among the early industries, cannot have failed to be apparent. From about 1600 the chief city of the Dauphin? underwent an astonishingly rapid development.

But, if the seventeenth century was little short of phenomenal in glove history, glove-making in Grenoble was not fated to become one of the leading enterprises of the world without a struggle. The hundred years that followed were at once the most sterile and the most fecund in the annals of the trade--and, for that matter, the same is equally true of the eighteenth century as regards its bearing upon the destinies of Europe. Destructive of immediate results and of contemporary prosperity, this era which endured the birth throes of modern states and the upheavals of the Revolution, was, nevertheless, big with prophetic good. And it is to the everlasting honor of the glovers of Grenoble that they bore their part in this vast social and political movement, which temporarily threatened death to their personal interests, with their eyes fixed, not upon gain, but upon those high ideals and principles to which their faith clung, even in the midst of business paralysis and social chaos.

While the flame of the Revolution did not break forth until nearly the close of the century, the spirit of modernity and unrest attacked the French people fully a hundred years before the fall of the Bastille. In Grenoble the transition from the old order to the new was anticipated as early as 1691, in response to a proclamation of the king that the business of the country be taxed to refill the royal treasury.

The importance of this initial association for an economic purpose scarcely can be overestimated. The Corporation later proved the unit of strength which was to render the glovers, as a body, invincible through the endless chain of vicissitudes, political, moral and industrial, which all but swept away, in the next hundred years, the totality of progress gained in the seventeenth century. In 1590 Grenoble had not 10,000 inhabitants. In 1692 Vauban values the population at 33,000. During the seventeenth century, then, its numbers had more than tripled, and this must needs strike one as the more remarkable inasmuch as city life in that epoch was little developed. Such growth, as we have seen, went hand in hand with the evolution of its industries. In 1692, Vauban wrote:

"The city contains a very numerous bourgeoisie, and is filled with a high quality of artisans which furnish a great variety of products to the largest part of the province. Its increase has been such that it actually is bursting out of its new ramparts. The city has dire need of expansion; all ranks of people demand it irresistibly."

In 1700 Vauban submitted a plan for enlarging extensively the city proper. This was not to be realized, however, until one hundred and forty years later. Already the tide had turned. The people were passing out through the gates of Grenoble, never to return. The eighteenth century was destined to be such a period of sacrifice and retardation, in a material sense, as the town had never known, even in the pestilence-ridden, war-mad days which preceded the advent of L?sdiguieres.

The sudden withdrawal of religious liberty cost France three hundred thousand of her people who emigrated to Germany, Holland, and other Protestant countries. A large element in these emigrations were the skilled artisans. Grenoble alone was deprived of nearly three thousand persons, among them the family of the L?sdiguieres, many others of the nobility and the gentlefolk, and a large body of masters and apprentices.

In 1705 the city lost five hundred individuals of the religious profession and seventy-three families of "gentilhommes," whose disappearance was no trifling matter, as these personages had been liberal patrons of the glovers, and it was their wealth which, in great part, had made business move. Industry in Grenoble, on every hand, was in a grievous state--but especially glove-making, the home demand being suddenly removed, and foreign trade little developed at that period.

Such was the deplorable effect of the Revocation. The glovers, however, proved themselves possessed of almost unbelievable powers of recuperation. In 1729 we find the sale of Grenoble gloves spreading rapidly in Germany, Switzerland, Savoy and Piedmont. Foreign trade steadily increased, despite the fact that the population of Grenoble remained, virtually, at a standstill. But trade abroad brought also foreign competition. While the Revocation had actually served Grenoble, indirectly, by causing the ruin of her rivals in France--Blois and Vendome, which could not support the drain of their emigrations; and especially Grasse, which was seriously crippled by loss of its master glovers and the departure of most of its families of wealth--these selfsame emigrations doubtless stimulated the manufacture of gloves outside France. Many of those who had served their apprenticeship in Grenoble, and master glovers holding the secrets of her arts, probably became rivals, in other lands, of the city they once had called their own.

All this complicated subject of commercial relations, the advantages and disadvantages of foreign trade, and the history of the glove market, will be treated separately and in detail in the chapter which follows. For the present, let us keep to our main issue--the vicissitudes in general of gloves and glove-makers in the leading glove city of the world during the stormy years of the eighteenth century.

From 1737 to 1746 we learn that the life of the Grenoble glovers--on the surface, at least--was comparatively monotonous. The manufacture made some progress, but the possibilities of expansion were not such as to stimulate very keenly those at the head of things. The masters and the workers lived without disagreement, apparently; the time-honored rules of the craft continued to be observed on both sides. In the Corporation a public magistrate managed the affairs of the association; the glovers themselves, it would seem, being too indifferent to take an active part. Prosperity appears to have been just about commensurate with the needs of the Corporation.

And yet, beneath this evident torpor, a vast inquietude was moving, like an earthquake under the sea. A fermentation of social discontent--bred by the philosophy of the times, by the glaring disparity between the ruling class and the working people, the latters' distrust of the morals and the assumed authority of the former, by the teachings of freemasonry and the trades unions--was slowly gathering momentum. In working centres--conspicuously in Grenoble and throughout the Dauphin?--the wealthy people were constantly framing remonstrances, begging the Royal Council to curb the mutterings of the proletariat.

This defence in behalf of the Grenoble glovers was at once an act of justice and an achievement of admirable foresight. The parliament did more than merely present the honest grievances of the industry. With a commendable vigor and pride it laid before the king a constructive measure which was to become the occasion in France of an economic revolution in the skin and glove trades. This was the beginning of the breaking down of custom duties on gloves between provinces. After a few years the internal taxes on this product were entirely abolished. Thus vanished all unfair competition at home, and neighboring glove cities ceased to come under the title of "the foreigner." At the same time, the selling of skins from province to province became free and general. Great fairs were held by the skin merchants, the tawers and tanners, for the benefit of all the surrounding region. Exportation of skins decreased, while home manufacturers rejoiced in the abundance of excellent materials.

The Corporation of Glovers, however, suffered meanwhile from the growing restlessness and vague ambitions of its workers. The old regulations were gradually and inevitably giving way before the awakening consciousness of a new race of wage-earners, grown almost morbidly distrustful of vested authority. The Dauphin? was afflicted with the bad example of many of its aristocrats. The nobility was indeed unworthy of its rank. The pervading restiveness and insubordination of the working class sprang out of a deep, instinctive resentment against the prevailing order. Of course, the first point of friction lay between the apprentices and the masters.

Though the severities of apprenticeship were modified, the former good faith between these two was irretrievably lost. Fear of foreign competition faded into insignificance before this intimate situation--the suspicious attitude toward one another of masters and workmen. Such was bound to be the price of a last, furious assault upon the mouldering ramparts of long-decayed feudalism.

The master glovers, on their side, shared in the social discontent, and participated in the long drawn-out struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to determine which of these should predominate in the local tribunals. The glovers of Grenoble contended that they, as an organized body of people, no longer merely having a trade, but enjoying also a social position encroaching on the importance of the man of the robe, the magistrate and the attorney, should have the largest voice in the making of the laws. Their product, they argued, was bringing money into France from England, Germany, Switzerland, and other northern countries, where more than one-half of their gloves were sold. In 1775, it is stated, out of 100,000 dozen pairs of gloves made in Grenoble, 60,000 were on commission for the foreigner. Naturally enough these manufacturers and merchants felt that over an idle, and even vicious, aristocracy, their opinions and practical needs should lead in shaping public legislation.

Further, bitter contention involved the business men of Grenoble with the lawyers of that city, for the latter persisted in looking down upon plain citizens not bred in their profession, and in excluding them from public affairs. In 1789 all glovers were shut out of the city council. In view of the fact that they "gave work daily to more than eight thousand persons, and thus enabled to live one-third of the population of Grenoble," the glovers resented bitterly this deliberate indignity from "les hommes du robe." It only fired them the more to throw themselves into the great conflict ahead; to prove that, even if they could not discourse so eloquently upon public matters as those who had insulted them, "at least they knew how to talk less, act more, and give all they possessed" to the cause of justice.

Thus, with the greatest crisis, perhaps, of modern times approaching, the glovers found themselves, workmen and masters alike, drawn almost before they knew it, into the very heart of the maelstrom. Industry itself was at a standstill. Nay, it was slipping backward; for in the midst of such internal suppression of terrible passions, such scorching hatreds, and ideals to set the world on fire, what footing could there be for the arts of peace?

And then the black cloud burst. Grenoble was drained of men whom the actual eruption of the Revolution forced to flee its walls. It was emptied of soldiers departing for the centre of action. The Revolution put out of business many of those following religious vocations, whose offices now were enlisted in grimmer callings; it wiped out of existence the gentlemen of leisure. There had been many of these latter in the beautiful, old city of the Dauphin?.

And who was there left to wear gloves, in all the length and breadth of France? What was to become, in such an hour, of an industry which addressed itself to the pleasure-loving rich, and to the privileged classes? The rich? There were no more rich. Privilege--the title, the robe, the gown? Lost off in the wild scurry of fugitives! In the appalling reaction, such a harmless mark of elegance as the glove, became, so to speak, branded with horror. To be seen in gloves in those days was to be marked for a criminal against mankind; to be suspected of being a Royalist, a lover of the king, a Judas to the People.

And yet one spectacle more remains--the silent factories on the Is?re. For the first time since the founding of its main industry and source of prosperity in the past, we behold the paradox of a gloveless Grenoble!

GLOVES IN MANY MARTS

The first glove-makers in Europe, we may suppose--certainly the first, skilled in that art, to work together in brotherhoods--were the monks of the early Middle Ages. In common with many other old-established handicrafts, the glove trade is deeply indebted to the Church. On this point, William S. Beck, the leading English authority on glove lore of thirty-five years ago, has summed up the conditions most interestingly and clearly. He says:

"Muscular Christianity is no new doctrine. Faith and works were once literally united in a secular sense. Before corruptions crept in, and while monastic establishments maintained the simple lines on which they had been founded, their inmates were the most skillful and industrious of artisans. Weaving, illuminating, gardening, embroidery, woodwork--these and many other occupations were practiced sedulously by the holy friars. The original idea of the founders of these institutions was to bring together a company of Christians who were workers. Benedict enjoins his followers to fight valiantly against idleness, the canker of truth.

"'Therefore,' he prescribes, 'the brethren must be occupied in the labor of the hands, and again at certain times in divine study.'

"The brethren not only practiced," says Beck, "but taught. The monastery became as much the centre of industry as of intellect; and religion was made an active worker with commerce in furthering national interests. The efforts of the brethren often resulted in raising local manufactures to great excellence, so that they obtained more than local celebrity. To the monks of Bath, for instance, is attributed much of the fame which the stout, woolen cloths of the west of England yet enjoy; and under their active auspices, we are told, the manufacture was introduced, established and brought to perfection. In their commercial curriculum glove-making was certainly included, as well as the dressing of leather."

As early as 790, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter, Charlemagne granted to the abbots and monks of Sithin in ancient France unlimited right of hunting the deer for skins of which to make gloves, girdles and covers for books. These gloves, made in the monasteries, assuredly were worn, not only by the higher orders of the clergy, but by the king and his nobles. They may have been a direct means of revenue among the monks; in any case, they were a favor exchanged for the patronage and support of the feudal lords in maintaining monastic property.

Needless to say, gloves were one of the luxuries of early trade and barter, and it was a late period before they became, to any extent, an article of common exchange. As gifts to kings and personages of high rank, they were borne from country to country, and thus, to a limited degree, were put into circulation. The Earl of Oxford, on one occasion, curried favor with Queen Elizabeth by presenting Her Majesty with beautiful, perfumed gloves which he, personally, had brought to her from Italy. The Queen, we are told, was so vain of this particular pair of gloves that she had her portrait painted in them. Little by little, as the privilege of wearing gloves spread from sovereign to subject, their trade was popularized, and the glove market, in the modern sense, grew up in response to the increasing demand.

On the occasion of the granting of the charter in 1638, certain abuses had crept into the industry, and it was to obviate these conditions that the document was demanded and granted by the king. It reads:

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